How many people die because Texas refuses Medicaid expansion? Who's to blame?
If you could save 730 Texans' lives each year, would you? If you could, but didn't, are you a murderer?
IS THAT A FAIR QUESTION?
You decide. Here are the pertinent facts:
Texas is the nation's most medically uninsured state, with 4.5 million uninsured, 623,000 of them children.
The Affordable Care Act provided a Medicaid expansion designed to cover the working poor whose incomes were too big to qualify for Medicaid, but way too small to afford health insurance. Texas alone would have received $10 billion a year.
In 2012, Texas and other Republican-run states went all the way to the Supreme Court to win the right to refuse this money. Texas' attorney general at the time, current Gov. Greg Abbott, took the lead for the plaintiff states, with the full support of then-Gov. Rick Perry.
Texas is one of 16 states that continue to refuse the Medicaid expansion.
About a million uninsured Texans would be eligible for Medicaid under the expansion.
A new University of Michigan study estimates that 15,600 people nationwide have died because their states refused the Medicaid expansion.
The annual rate in Texas of deaths that could be avoided by expanding Medicaid, according to the study, is 730.
WHAT'S THE VERDICT?
We thought the first sentence of a story in The Atlantic based on the study would be worth noting: "Did Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts kill almost 16,000 people?"
Read more: https://www.caller.com/story/opinion/2019/08/07/why-does-texas-allow-730-people-year-die-needlessly-medicaid-expansion-greg-abbott-michigan-study/1932174001/
(Corpus Christi Caller-Times)